Monday, January 20, 2014
Barker's Newsbites: Monday, January 20, 2014
Mornin', folks!
So... both my picks won yesterday - a Seattle vs. Denver Superbowl it is! (Denver's gonna kick their ass...)
Politics? A bit of a lull...
(You've been following newsbites - right? Ya should. You'll learn stuff!)
Anyway... today's newsbites theme song...
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http://the-free-foundation.org/tst1-20-2014.html
* BY THE ALWAYS HONORABLE RON PAUL
Supporters of warfare, welfare, and Wonder Woman cheered last week as Congress passed a one trillion dollar “omnibus” appropriation bill.
(*SPITTING ON THE GROUND*)
This legislation funds the operations of government for the remainder of the fiscal year. Wonder Woman fans can cheer that buried in the bill was a $10,000 grant for a theater program to explore the comic book heroine.
* IF AL-QIADA WERE TO RUN A FUNDRAISER PROMISING THAT THE MONEY WOULD ONLY BE USED TO TARGET MEMBERS OF CONGRESS WOULD YOU CONTRIBUTE?
That is just one of the many outrageous projects buried in this 1,582 page bill.
The legislation gives the Department of Education more money to continue nationalizing education via “common core.”
Also, despite new evidence of ObamaCare's failure emerging on an almost daily basis, the Omnibus bill does nothing to roll back this disastrous law.
* OF COURSE NOT...
Even though the Omnibus bill dramatically increases government spending, it passed with the support of many self-described “fiscal conservatives.”
(*SHRUG*)
Those wondering why anyone who opposes increasing spending on programs like common core and Obamacare would vote for the bill may find an answer in the fact that the legislation increases funding for the “Overseas Continuing Operations” — which is the official name for the war budget — for the first time since 2010. This $85 billion war budget contains $6 billion earmarked for projects benefiting Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and other big defense contractors.
(*SIGH*)
Ever since “sequestration” went into effect at the beginning of last year, the military-industrial complex’s congressional cheering session has complained that sequestration imposed “draconian cuts” on the Pentagon that will “decimate” our military — even though most of the "cuts" were actually reductions in the "projected rate of growth."
(*NOD*)
In fact, under sequestration, defense spending was to increase by 18% over ten years, as opposed to growing by 20% without sequestration.
* DRACONIAN...
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
Many of the defenders of increased war spending are opponents of welfare, but they are willing to set aside their opposition to increased welfare spending in order to increase warfare spending.
(*SIGHING WHILE NODDING*)
They are supported in this position by the lobbyists for the military-industrial complex and the neoconservatives, whose continued influence on foreign policy is mystifying. After all, the neocons were the major promoters of the disastrous military intervention in Iraq.
While many neocons give lip service to limiting domestic spending, their main priority remains protecting high levels of military spending to maintain an interventionist foreign policy.
Fortunately, in recent years more Americans have recognized that a constant defense of liberty requires opposing both war and welfare.
* UNNECESSARY WAR... UNNECESSARY WARFARE...
Many of these Americans, especially the younger ones, have joined the intellectual and political movement in favor of limiting government in all areas.
* AMEN!
This movement presents the most serious challenge the bipartisan welfare-warfare consensus has faced in generations. Hopefully, the influence of this movement will lead to bipartisan deals cutting both welfare and warfare spending.
* DOUBTFUL.
The question facing Americans is not whether Congress will ever cut spending. The question is will the spending be reduced in an orderly manner that avoids inflecting massive harm on those depending on government programs, or will spending be slashed in response to an economic crisis caused by ever-increasing levels of deficit spending.
* I'M GUESSING THE LATTER.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/19/hacking-expert-david-kennedy-says-he-cracked-healt/
The man who appeared before Congress last week to explain the security pitfalls of HealthCare.gov took to Fox News on Sunday to explain just how easy it was to penetrate the website.
Hacking expert David Kennedy told Fox’s Chris Wallace that gaining access to 70,000 personal records of Obamacare enrollees via HealthCare.gov took about 4 minutes and required nothing more than a standard browser, the Daily Caller reported.
Mr. Kennedy testified before Congress Thursday that HealthCare.gov was “100%” insecure, Washington Free Beacon reported.
(*CLAP...CLAP...CLAP*)
“What we learned was that they had rushed through what we call the software development life cycle where they actually build the application,” he said on Fox. “So when you do that, security doesn’t really get integrated into it. And what happened with the rocky launch in October is they slapped a bunch of servers in trying to fix the website just to keep it up and running so that people could actually go and use it. The problem is they still didn’t imbed any security into it.”
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
“And 70,000 was just one of the numbers that I was able to go up to and I stopped after that,” he said. “You know, I’m sure it’s hundreds of thousands, if not more, and it was done within about a 4 minute timeframe. So, it’s just wide open.”
“You can literally just open up your browser, go to this, and extract all this information without actually having to hack the website itself,” he said.
“It’s not just myself that’s saying this website is insecure, it’s also seven other independent security researchers that also looked at the research I’ve done and came to the exact same conclusion,” he said.
* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/obamacare-significant-risk-death-spiral-economist-warns
Economist John Goodman warned last October that ObamaCare could plunge into a “death spiral” if not enough young, healthy people signed up for coverage...
* IT'S CALLED "MATH."
Following news that the Obama administration failed to hit its young adult enrollment target, Goodman now says, “I think there is a significant problem here, I think the insurers are worried. I think the administration is worried."
“Remember, everybody is facing the wrong price."
(*NOD*)
"Sick people are facing a price that’s well below the cost of their care. Young healthy people are being overcharged. And so they need lots of young healthy people to join so they can get the money to pay the bills for the sick people. And the younger people just aren’t buying it."
A death spiral - the insurance pool equivalent of bankruptcy - occurs when too many older and sicker people sign up for insurance relative to the number of younger, healthier people, Goodman explained, forcing everybody’s premiums up. But as premiums rise, even less young people sign up for coverage.
“That’s what we’re seeing so far,” Goodman told CNSNews.com. “Over half of all the people who enrolled are above the age of 45, and older people are more expensive [to insure]. We’re also seeing 20% of the people who are enrolling are going for the gold or platinum plans. Those people tend to be sick. They’re buying the more comprehensive plans because they plan to use a lot of health care.”
According to figures released this week by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, only 24% of the 2.2 million people who have already signed up for ObamaCare are between the ages of 18 and 34, just a little more than half of the 40% the administration admitted it needed to keep premiums affordable.
(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
When CNSNews.com asked Goodman how Americans would know if the system was crashing, he replied: “Well, there won’t be any neon signs that say 'Death Spiral Underway,’ but what you’ll see is premiums keep rising, and if premiums keep rising, then fewer healthy people will buy in and we may get to a point where you need government subsidies to prop the whole thing up. By that I mean government subsidies to the insurance companies.”
"It turns out that 80% of all the people who signed up so far are getting subsidies. Well, they need lots of people who have higher incomes and who aren’t going to get subsidies. And if those people are unwilling to pay the high premiums that are being charged, then they’re in trouble. …Everybody is worried, and no one’s keeping the fact that they’re worried a secret,” Goodman added.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)
ObamaCare's “perverse incentives” will just encourage more young people to “game the system and wait until they get sick before they enroll,” he said, while insurance companies “try to avoid the sick” to protect their bottom lines. But that will be increasingly hard to do as tens of thousands of government retirees are dumped into the exchanges.
“Over the next three months, the federal government will end its risk pool and all the state governments will end theirs, and then all those people who are high-cost enrollees, they will go into the exchanges. And then there are cities and towns like Detroit, that have made promises of post-retirement care and they’re not funded, and so Detroit’s planning on sending all of its retirees to the exchange, and lots of other cities will do the same thing….”
* FOLKS... OBAMACARE WAS CREATED TO FAIL... CREATED TO FAIL AND TAKE THE "OLD" SYSTEM WITH IT - OPENING THE DOOR FOR SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. HEY... FOLKS... HOW DO YOU SUPPOSE SOCIALIZED MEDICINE IS GONNA WORK WHEN THE GOVERNMENT DOESN'T HAVE THE MONEY TO MEET IT'S PRE-EXISTING OPERATING EXPENSES, LET ALONE FUND A WHOLE NEW ALL-ENCOMPASSING WELFARE SYSTEM PUTTING EVERYONE ON WHAT AMOUNTS TO MEDICAID/MEDICARE?
* KEEP READING... IT GETS WORSE...
“And then the Obama administration’s apparently going to allow hospitals and AIDS clinics to enroll people on the spot,” Goodman told CNSNews.com. “So if a hospital had a patient who’s having heart surgery, for example, that hospital is going to be able to get him enrolled in a private plan in the exchange to shift the cost over to that insurer." (Apparently the hospital can actually pay the premium for the individual.) “You see, the premium is small compared to that hospital bill. So if we’re talking about a $50,000 hospital bill, they can afford to pay a $10,000 premium and come out ahead. So insurers are sort of quite vulnerable at the moment.”
However, if ObamaCare does go belly up, there will be no easy way to replace it, Goodman warned. “We have destroyed the individual market, and it’s going to be very, very hard to move from where we are now to a real market, where people face real prices, which is what I think we have to do,” he said.
“Republicans who say we’re just going to abolish ObamaCare need to be aware of the fact that they can’t just go back to the individual market, because it’s being destroyed. We need to think carefully about how we can get out of the mess we’re in, [because] just repealing the legislation isn’t going to be enough.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-20/stop-obamacare-s-outrageous-bailouts.html
President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul looks extremely unlikely to hit the goal set for it in October: enrolling “at least” 7 million people in exchanges by April.
So... the administration is redefining success as mere survival for the program.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has already achieved “preliminary sustainability,” an official recently told the National Journal.
* NO SUCH THING. (SERIOUSLY! THEY JUST MADE THAT UP!)
And what’s making the program sustainable? The prospect of a massive taxpayer bailout.
* YEP... THE TRUTH IS COMING OUT... KEEP READING...
The bailout would come from the law’s “risk corridor” provisions.
* WHAT?! YOU NEVER HEARD OF THESE?
(*SMIRK*)
If insurers pay out more than 108% of the premiums they collect from customers in ObamaCare's exchanges, taxpayers are on the hook for about 75% of the extra cost.
* BUT... BUT... BUT... WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER 25%...??? (HECK... WHAT ABOUT THAT 8%... YOU KNOW... THE "EIGHT" FROM THE "HUNDRED AND EIGHT?")
If the insurers make profits that are more than 108% of their collections, they have to pay back a similar proportion.
* AND HOW COULD THAT POSSIBLY HAPPEN...???
Health insurer Humana Inc. recently warned that enrollees in the exchanges will probably be sicker than anticipated. So few if any insurers will be in surplus, and many will be seeking help. In other words, the exchanges as a whole will be unbalanced and in need of a taxpayer bailout. The CBO hasn’t estimated how much the risk corridors will cost if participants in the exchanges are especially unhealthy.
* ONE MORE TIME...
The CBO hasn’t estimated how much the risk corridors will cost if participants in the exchanges are especially unhealthy.
* YOU'VE GOTTA BE FRIGGIN' KIDDING ME...?!?!
Jonathan Cohn, a defender of ObamaCare and the risk corridors, notes that the payouts “have no actual limit.”
* OH... GREAT... (MEANING POTENTIAL BAILOUTS HAVE NO ACTUAL LIMITS!)
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